Over and Under
by ACleverName
Summary: Martha and the Doctor on a shopping mall under a gaseous sea.  Martha being jealous and unrequited.
1. Chapter 1

**Over and Under**

_I am so over him, _Martha thought as the TARDIS door closed behind her. Though she was grateful that she had gotten out of yet another death-defying situation—and was still drenched in the sweat to prove it—she'd just shared a kiss with a man she'd most likely never see again. It exhilarated her; she was still coming down from that familiar adrenaline rush. Seldom a day passed by without it, since she had met the Doctor!

She breathed a sigh of relief as the TARDIS' engines—or whatever they were, the Doctor had still not really explained—took over, bathing them in that weirdly jaunty green light. The Doctor grinned: he loved this part. It was difficult sometimes to remember he wasn't human. She'd jump-started his two hearts more times than she could count, but other than some weird momentary quirks, he could really convince. Though he was always cool to the touch, and that was unsettling.

"You all right?" he asked her.

"Yeah, fine, you?" She stretched out and fell into the sofa. It gave a satisfying bounce.

He pulled at his collar. "Yeah, of course."

She took a deep breath. "I'm shattered!"

"Me too," he said slowly, leaning over the console and its dancing lights.

She yawned, surprised. He never said he was tired, or anything like that. Indeed, that was another of those "alien" attributes. "Starving, too," she added. She couldn't remember if she'd eaten in the last day or not.

"Right, time for chips!" the Doctor announced gleefully.

Martha frowned. This girl Rose had had some kind of obsession with chips. Martha may not be the healthiest eater, but give her some pasta over chips any day. It was like the Doctor's insistence on tea. Not that she didn't like tea, she'd just prefer a coffee from time to time.

"Can we have something other than chips, please?"

He looked a little hurt. "What did you have in mind?"

She let her thoughts spin wildly out of control for a minute: if she wanted pasta, what about an authentic Tuscan meal? A little bit of red wine, surely the Doctor couldn't object to that? Maybe cannoli for dessert? Or was that really authentic? As she pondered, the Doctor pulled down a lever. "I know just the place!"

Martha tried to suppress a groan. "Is this in the solar system at least?"

"On the outer edge of the Milky Way," he said, jamming buttons. "Little strip mall on one of the twelve moons of the Pleiades system."

"Strip mall?" she snapped.

"Oh, you'll like it!" the Doctor insisted, digging around in his jacket pocket. "This time I've even got currency!" He pulled out what looked like sheets of hammered plastic and handed them to her. "Loads of shopping!"

She bit the inside of her cheek. "You like to shop?" She remembered that he had been rather overly enthusiastic about hospital shops or lack thereof.

He looked baffled. "I thought you were the one who liked shoes and stuff."

She shrugged and hugged her stomach. "We gonna get there soon?"

"Yeah, not long now."

She realized, of course, that by the technology of these extinct Time Lord people, the TARDIS could readily supply any comfort she wished—including foods of various sorts. (There was an entire cupboard stacked endlessly with chocolate Hobknobs.) But going out and making a game of it was much more fun and interactive. And it gave her a chance to be with the Doctor. As friends, of course. She could still taste the salt of the other man's kiss.

Martha's pasta was blue and green, and the Doctor encouraged her to press the anti-grav button on the pasta container so she could catch floating pieces in her mouth. He demonstrated with such enthusiasm that the yellow cheese sauce—strongly tasting of herbs from far away, defying description—had spilled all over his jacket.

The food court of the mall was set underneath a liquid methane sea, which produced beautiful fireworks-like spectacles at regular intervals during the day, but was potentially lethal. With this in mind, Martha had eaten her admittedly unforgettable pasta quickly, not eager to exchange being baked alive for having her flesh stripped from her bones.

The Doctor had been taken away by an enthusiastic one-eyed maintenance creature, which the Doctor had said was from Alpha Centauri, to be dry-cleaned in some special facility, free of charge. Martha sat on her own, avoiding looking upward at the transparent ceiling, drinking directly from a prune-like fruit with a straw stuck in it—a delicacy, the Doctor had emphasized. She liked the crush of people—well, different species of unimaginable variety—it reminded her of home. In a weird way.

With the Doctor nowhere in sight, Martha got up and made a determined beeline for the nearest row of shops. There was no way she could miss the Doctor—especially if he was still with the Alpha Centauri creature—and besides, she had her key now and no mistaking where they had parked the TARDIS.

The shops were mostly low-lit or screaming with color and blaring with discordant music. Stepping past them was like peering into the improbable magick shop in Stratford-upon-Avon—slightly disorienting. There was something like incense blowing all over the place, which was in fact somewhat comforting—the Doctor smelled a little like that. What? When she was giving him mouth-to-mouth, it had been difficult to shut off her olfactory senses!

A giant bouquet of pink flowers, bustling with scent, exploded in front of her face. She coughed and batted it away, unsurprised as it dissipated into pink, sweet-smelling smoke. A woman from behind a counter of potions in bottles beckoned. She had a look of avarice comparable, in Martha's mind, only to the Wicked Queen in _Snow White. _She was dressed in purple, as well. The bottles were bubbling and ranged in color from lilac to champagne. "Are these love potions?" Martha dared to ask.

"Yes, and so much more," the woman replied.

She'd had her fill of witches. "Not interested."

"Oh, but you must fancy someone," the woman said. Martha noticed she had ears that looked like jeweled butterfly wings flapping nervously on the sides of her head. Martha wasn't even tempted to make a crack about Dumbo. In her moment's hesitance, the saleswoman removed what looked like a piece of paper from her sleeve.

"A greeting card?" Martha snapped. "I've seen these before." On the front, there was script with several blanks.

"I doubt you have," said the saleswoman.

Martha took a closer look. _A sucker is born every minute, _she told herself, but she had to admit she was intrigued. "Ever since I met you, I felt ," it said. "Your makes me want to . I would love to with you. I've always wanted to tell you ." She screwed up her face; this could be really dirty if the person filling it out was determined. She opened the card. "It's completely blank inside," she muttered.

"That's how it works," the saleswoman cackled. "You write in whatever you want from the object of your affections. And it comes true."

Martha's eyes glittered. "Hold on. Is there some kind of chemical aphrodisiac imbedded in the paper or what?"

"Power of suggestion."

Martha rolled her eyes. "All right. So supposin' I wrote, 'I love you. Love me too," it'd magically just happen?" The saleswoman smiled. Martha felt unnerved. She put it down. "Like I said, not—"

"You buy this pen," the saleswoman said, picking up a perfectly ordinary-looking pen, "and I'll throw in the card for free. What do you have to lose?"

Well, it was true Martha liked having a pen on her at all times. It was cheap, she saw from the price tag that appeared in midair next to it. It's not like she was going to use it. She dug change out of her pocket. Her mother always chided her for making purchases like this. Tish, on the other hand, wold have encouraged her to try it. Just for curiosity's sake. The money changed hands, the saleswoman put the card and the pen into a pink, glittering bag, and Martha left. Exiting and moving back to the food court made her feel slightly tarnished, like she was walking out of a sex shop with a big black bag.

She went directly to the TARDIS; maybe she could enter without running into the Doctor. He was sitting on the sofa when she came in. "Took you long enough."

"You weren't going to leave without me?" she asked, panicked. He gave her an "are you joking?" look. She tried to hide the brilliantly pink bag behind her back. He wasn't wearing his jacket or his coat. She wondered if they'd been permanently stained.

"Enjoy it?" he asked.

"Yeah, except the methane sea above my head," she said, tart and edging toward the door.

"_That _didn't scare you?" he tutted, moving toward her. The bag. He'd certainly see it. "You bought something!" he exclaimed. "What is it?"

"Um, nothing, nothing important," she said, backing away as he advanced, all charming smiles, his face lit up.

"Come on," he coaxed. "Let me see!" He was indefatigable, like a snooping, sniffing puppy. He'd grabbed the bag, was about to peer inside.

"It's . . . underwear, all right! Do you mind?"

He held up his hands as if he'd been burnt, then started rubbing his forehead. "Um, sorry. Sorry," he mumbled. "I'll, uh, I'll just . . ."

She left the room, her face burning. He'd seen her underwear before, she reminded herself—he'd had to, in her flat. Her embarrassment had heightened his, and— "This is ridiculous," she shouted to the walls of her room once she made it inside. She threw the glittering bag to the floor and left as quickly as she'd come in, stomping her way back to the Console Room, determined to—determined to what?

"Are we going somewhere?" she asked, hearing the motor running (or whatever it was).

"Did you want to go home?" he asked.

She hoped her levity disguised her panic. "You're not ready to chuck me out already?"

"Nah," he said, running his hand through his hair. "It's just hard, sometimes, knowing what humans want."

Sometimes he said "humans" in that tone that made her want to smack him. Maybe he had cultural and technological superiority, but did he have to flaunt it all the time? "We have pretty basic needs, Doctor. Food, water, air, shelter, protection, something to keep out the hot an' the cold." She took a breath. "Companionship."

No response was forthcoming, and with a sigh she said, "Like I said, I'm tired, so I'll see you later."

It was deceptively easy to walk away. In her room, with her boots off and her feet up, her hair down, she could think more clearly than in the Console Room, all the green and gold making her sick. Psychology wasn't her specialty, medicine was, but it didn't take an expert to concede, no, she was _not _over him. Never would be over him, perhaps. And perhaps the stupid card could serve some purpose: as catharsis, and she could get past it, at least for a little while.

She took out the pen. It really was a nice pen; it'd been a bargain at that price, she reckoned. "Ever since I met you, I felt . . ." _Elated, _she wrote, tunneling through her vocabulary in a way she hadn't since GCSEs. _Scared, awed, full of energy and just . . . brilliant. _(Her scribbling was illegible. This encouraged her.) "Your . . ." She suspected the author of the card meant this to be some kind of physical attribute that might make the purchaser want to jump someone's bones. He did have a lot of rather nice physical attributes, she reflected, but that wasn't really the point. She was a doctor. She was empathic. "Your _loneliness," _she wrote, _"_makes me want to _help you." _Comfort and healing—weren't those very natural responses? There were moments she caught him gazing off, melancholy, and what she wanted to do then was just pat him on the shoulder. Something held her back. Something always held her back.

"I would love to with you," could raise an eyebrow, she thought. For all his talk of genetic transfers, she wouldn't half love to kiss him again. Somehow crossing out the "with" and writing _snog you _lacked gravity. And she wasn't about to think anything more explicit than that, however tight his suit might be! She settled for the mundane: "I would love to _talk _with you." _Really _talk. On most occasions it was the Doctor composing an articulate and bouncy rant. The one time when he'd told her about Gallifrey, his home planet that no longer existed, she had felt a massive surge of affection for him: he shared so little of himself with her—she subsisted on crumbs—and this flood of feeling made her feel special, wanted.

"I've always wanted to tell you . . ." Well, this one was easy. _How much you mean to me. _Oh, from the very first when he was busy endangering her life, when she was close to death, she thought of her family first, and she thought of him. "God, this is sappy," she muttered. She could, of course, tell him exactly that—how she felt. At best, he would ignore her, at worst, he really would chuck her out. Perhaps, in a way, he already knew. She'd saved his life, as he'd saved hers—maybe that was already the strongest bond between two people, that didn't even require verbal confirmation.

She opened the card. The blankness was vast. But she knew exactly what she wanted to say. Her flippant remark to the saleswoman was deep-seated. _I love you. Love me too? _She felt that piece of punctuation was essential. Even where persuasion was concerned, she wasn't about to start issuing commands. To _make _someone feel or think something—even in her yearnings she couldn't admit to that, condone such a tyranny. She closed the card and sighed. Well, it was done. Had she exorcised her feelings?

There was a rapid knocking at the door. She got to her feet, threw some clothes over the card, and opened the door. Some kind of death-defying problem with the TARDIS? "Hi, yeah, sorry to disturb," said the Doctor, bouncing on his toes. "You didn't happen to pick up any psychic paper with your purchases?" He strode past her into the room, examining it like an amateur detective. "Don't mind, do you . . .?"

"Actually, I do," she muttered. "And why would I have psychic paper?"

The Doctor was waving a piece of paper. "Mine's not working. Two pieces of psychic paper in the same vicinity, short each other out."

"Well, that's not very clever."

"A design flaw, one of many, in fact."

"Such as it doesn't work on geniuses?"

"Yeah," he said, looking past her. "You sure someone didn't slip something in your pocket . . . or?"

"Why would they do that? Look, it's not going to cause any big damage, is it? Destroy the TARDIS' navigational systems?"

"No, but it's a bit annoying." He looked a bit plaintive. Then he went for the pink bag on the floor. Shook it out. Empty.

"Doctor, before you start going through all my stuff, I got this pen," she said, handing it to him. He played with the spring mechanism spastically before handing it back to her.

"Some kind of promotional item they might have shoved in the bag. You might have thrown it away without even noticing it." His hand alighted on the card, pushing aside one of her boots. A thousand plausible explanations passed between her brain synapses and her mouth, but he was too quick.

He examined the card, blankly. "Don't—" she cried as he opened it. He stared. She held her breath. _What an immature idiot you are, Martha Jones! _She closed her eyes. She cracked one open. He wasn't staring at the card anymore. He was looking into her eyes, quite still, and though she wanted to turn away, she felt compelled to return stare for stare. She could see the freckles on his cheeks, the unruly hair over his forehead. His eyes were big and dark, shining, the rest of his face immobile.

"Martha?" he said, but it wasn't his voice. It was the voice of someone lost, groping in the darkness. He lifted his hand, dropped the card. It fluttered to the ground, face down. He moved his hand toward her face. She wasn't breathing. She couldn't breathe. He touched her skin, traced her cheekbone.

Then he shook himself, like someone coming out of a dream. A pleasant dream, but unconnected to this reality wholly. "Do you mind if I toss this?" he asked, bending to pick up the card. He did not even look at it.

Martha wasn't sure how she found her voice. "Of course."

He was already out the door. "Nighty-night, then."

"Glad to be of help," she said, weakly, to the door.


	2. Part II

_II._

Martha wasn't very good at brewing her own coffee. As much as she hated to admit it, she did rather rely on Costa Coffee to get her through exams. Her mother made good coffee, when she wasn't yelling at her ex-husband, and the stuff in the hospital was, surprisingly, passable. The TARDIS, on the other hand, made very strong black coffee. She hadn't convinced the Doctor to install a cappuccino machine, yet.

She'd clocked in several hours in bed, the embarrassing affair of the card forgotten in an exciting fly-by through rings twice the girth of Saturn's. Yet it was in the kitchen, fussing over her coffee because she was not used to staying still, that she yawned and the Doctor took notice.

He was gushing about the rings, and wasn't quite pleased that she had interrupted. "Sorry, I thought this was interesting?"

She yawned again—she couldn't help it—and said, "Sorry, Doctor. I didn't get much sleep last night."

He sniffed her coffee, then poured himself tea from a brown teapot. "What do you mean? How much do you humans have to sleep then? Rose was always going around with dark circles, never enough . . ."

Martha looked at her coffee. "My REM sleep kept getting interrupted."

The Doctor raised an eyebrow. "Oh yes? By what?"

"Did you know," she said slowly, "that about 80 of all dreams are marked by negative emotions?"

The Doctor smiled, sat down next to her; she could tell he was pleased. "Do go on, Doctor Jones."

Psychology had only amounted to a bit of space on exams, but she'd done well on it, it interested her, she remembered her consciousness lectures. "For humans," she began, with a nod in his direction, "every ninety minutes, there's a cycle of five sleep stages."

"Yeah, you and your circadian rhythms," said the Doctor. "It's a bit limiting, isn't it?" She cleared her throat, looked at him expectantly. "Oh, sorry."

"Some children have night terrors in Stage Four, but the majority of nightmares occur in Stage Five, REM sleep."

He nodded at her. "That's quite brilliant. Anyone else, they just say, 'I'm having nightmares,' but not you. You're scientific about it. Good on you, Martha Jones."

Surprise and pleasure crossed Martha's face, unused to the Doctor's praise, but also confusion. "Nightmare, from the Middle English," he announced. "A sort of incubus figure—"

"You're sort of paralyzed," Martha said suddenly. "There's nothing lyrical about that. Your motor cortex is functioning but there's some sort of block at your brain stem. So you're scared and you can't wake up, your brain waves are racing . . ."

The Doctor's look darkened. "What did you dream about, then?" Martha was reticent, seeming to consider. "Or perhaps you don't want to say."

"Most people," she said, "dream of their daily lives. The office, at home. But lately 'daily life' has been a little different for me. If that's life on a regular basis . . . one wonders what you dream about, Doctor."

He looked beyond her, wrapped his hands around his tea cup. She was fairly certain he wasn't going to answer when he said, "I don't sleep much. And I'm not human." Her coffee now cool enough to drink, she slurped loudly to cover the silence. He got up in a flash, clapped his hands together. "If you're having trouble sleeping—" he started going through cupboards—"we can find something here to help."

"No!" Martha snapped, getting out of her chair. "That's just treating the symptoms, not the cause. You, of all people—I thought—wouldn't just start throwing pills at people!"

The Doctor smiled. "You're very passionate. Tell me, Martha, what made you want to be a doctor?"

She stared. "Oh, I dunno."

"Tell me." He was playful now, more seductive than he realized.

"It wasn't much of a choice, really. I was always pretty good at maths and science. It just seemed the thing to do. I did five A-levels, I did really well in biology and chemistry—"

"That's not true," he said with an uncanny tilt of his eyebrow.

"You questioning what A-levels I got?!"

"Nah, I'm sure you did brilliantly. I mean, that isn't the reason you became a doctor." It was hard to lie to that face, so old and so young at the same time.

"It . . . it's stupid, really," she said, dumping the contents of her mug into the sink. But since he'd asked . . . "It was Christmas one year, Leo was just a toddler. Mum and Dad were having a row, as usual. Dad slammed the door and ran out, and I don't remember too clearly what happened—except there was Dad, in hospital, with a huge white cast around his leg, surrounded by all these people in coats.

"They still argue to this day about whose fault it was. A slick patch of ice. Now, obviously, I was grateful to the hospital for taking care of Dad—but when you're that little, your mind doesn't have that grip over cause and effect. But I thought at the time, how cool to put a cast on somebody. To repair, to improve." She looked up at him for approbation. He was smiling rather tenderly, but it was some kind of affection for the human race as a whole. That was the way he thought.

"I knew another doctor," he said. "Pragmatic, always running about a bit exasperated. But with her heart in the right place." Rather involuntarily, she thought, his hand went to his chest, where, improbably, two hearts were beating. "Compassionate and brave. She became a doctor because she wanted to hold back death."

_Were you in love with her two? _Martha wanted to ask. "She didn't want to travel with me," said the Doctor, a little forlornly, she thought.

"Doctor," she ventured, her voice shaky, "I'm not the only one having nightmares."

"What?" he asked, his voice high-pitched.

"Classic signs of sleep deprivation," she said boldly. "Lack of concentration, irritability, tendency to make mistakes—"

"I just said I'm not human," he said, his voice tight. "Your diagnosis is very good, but—"

"You do sleep, Doctor. But you haven't been lately. Not since we got off the spaceship heading for the sun." She bit her lip and moved closer. "It disturbed you, I know it did, and it's no use hiding it from a medical student."

He ran a hand through his hair and sighed. "I appreciate what you're trying to do. But if you don't like how I fly the TARDIS, you can leave."

She stared at him coolly. "Oh, I see. With the ailing human, it's Fix-Her-Up-Quick, but you're so different, you're so alien . . ." She took a deep breath. "I don't want to leave. The world's wide and terrible and beautiful. But I . . ."

"Martha," he said kindly, "I can promise you nightmares are the least of my worries." And he looked transcendent then, a living embodiment of past, present, and future. She knew he would never admit to fears of losing self-control, of things worse than death.

"Fine," she said, putting her mug away. "I understand you don't want to be diagnosed and observed. I wouldn't either. Just don't keep me up at night with sleep-talking and I don't know what." His face was blank and very white when she closed the door.


End file.
